Wednesday, March 25, 2009

China Stories - Cambridge School of Art at Anglia Ruskin University, UK


Harvey Benge - Auckland, New Zealand
Oyvind Hjelmen - Stord, Norway
Ferit Kuyas - Zürich, Switzerland
Pok Chi Lau - Kansas City, USA
Elaine Ling - Toronto, Canada
Christopher Rauschenberg - Portland, USA
Gerard Saitner - Paris, France
Wolfgang Zurborn - Cologne, Germany

April 3rd - April 18th, 2009
Opening: April 2nd, 2009

Ruskin Gallery - Cambridge School of Art (CSA)
at Anglia Ruskin University, UK
Cambridge Campus
East Road, Cambridge, CB1 1PT
Mon-Fri 9 a.m.-9 p.m., Sat 10 a.m.-5 p.m.


Harvey Benge - These are a series of images I made in 2006 and 2007 when I was a guest at the Pingyao Festival in Shanxi Province China. Subsequently published in 2008 by FAQEDITIONS the pictures explore the everyday and overlooked in the Chinese landscape. Image from CHINA STORY, FAQEDITIONS, 2008

Øyvind Hjelmen - Journey Elsewhere When I travelled through China In December 2007.I tried to note my impressions of little bits of grace and surprise that I discover day by day. One may ask, is such a journey really a journey elsewhere, or is it just a journey going deeper within oneself? To be honest, I think both ideas are true…

Ferit Kuyas - City of Ambition This is a visit to one of the largest cities in the world, Chongqing, populated by roughly 32 million people. I am mainly interested in the outskirts of Chongqing, where the city can’t be really seen but sensed, like a tiger moving through the jungle – invisible, yet there.

Pok Chi Lau – China 1979 -1982 - Post Chairman Mao Period When Lau was 19 and living in Hong Kong, his parents borrowed enough money to pay for two cameras, a plane ticket and college tuition. He studied at the Brooks Institute of Photography and the California Institute of the Arts. Beginning in the late 1970s, Lau traveled from one Chinatown to the next documenting the lives of Chinese immigrants working at mines, railroads, laundries and restaurants and often living in cramped conditions.

Wolfgang Zurborn - China! Which China? In June 2006 I visited Beijing and Shanghai. The challenge of the encounter with the unfamiliar world was to transform the personal experience of the highly complex and interlaced parallel worlds of these "Megacities" into an individual picture language which should not keep the unknown in the realm of the exotic but which discovers the nearness in the strange.

Elaine Ling – China Stones is a journey (1995) down the Spirit Road, a long avenue flanked on either side by pairs of stone sculptures of animals and figures, This road leads up to an earth tumulus beneath which lies the underground palace in which the emperor's body rested surrounded by treasures and other objects placed for use in the afterlife.

Chris Rauschenberg was travelling in China in 1985. He is looking at the urban spaces in China in a very fragmentary view. Objects of everyday life are developing an absurd own life. His panoramic photographs are forcing the very subjective construction of space.

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